


uncharted.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Sassy, Sastiel - Freeform, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2014-02-19
Packaged: 2017-12-29 00:29:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/998706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in which cas runs away from home and sam develops feelings for a stolen station wagon. complete.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He catches up with Cas in Topeka.  Cas is sitting on a bench by the bus station. This is more or less where Sam has suspected he would be. Cas might’ve gotten a head start, but he hadn’t caught Cas hiking along on the side of the interstate at any point in the past three hours, so he’s been figuring that either Cas has invoked the powers of the public transportation system of Kansas, in which case he might catch up with Cas at some point down the line, or else Cas has taken to hitchhiking, in which case he might not.

Sam parks the Volvo up against the curb.  He still feels sort of bad about the Volvo.  Sam’s stolen cars at variously depressing moments in his life.  He usually does feel bad about it.  Sometimes not.  He’s feeling bad about this whole thing, really, and he isn’t sure why.  He thinks, logically, reasonably, I shouldn’t be doing this. It’s a bad idea.  It’s not safe.  I should take the Volvo and head back to the bunker.  But he also _feels_ like he shouldn’t turn around.  That going after Cas is the right thing to do.  It’s disconcerting.  He picks up a few quarters from the Volvo’s floorboards and dispenses them into the parking meter.  He feels bad about that, too.

He thinks Cas has seen him.  He squashes down whatever traitorous part of him still wants to leave and approaches the bench, with some caution.  But Cas doesn’t bother looking up.  He’s slumped over, his chin in his hands and elbows resting on his knees. 

"Hey, Cas," Sam says.

"Hello, Sam," Cas says tonelessly.  "You found me."

"Yeah," Sam agrees.  "Wasn’t that hard.  You wouldn’t have gotten very far, you know. Dean has a GPS tracker on your phone.”  Cas frowns and takes his phone of his pocket.  He turns it over in his hands, squinting. "Can I sit?”  

"No," Cas says in that same dead voice.  Sam drops down on the bench beside him anyway.  "You are intruding," Cas says.  

"On what?" Sam asks, genuinely curious. 

"On _me_.”  Cas is taking up the entire length of the bench.  He doesn’t do any of the things that a normal person would.  He doesn’t put his backpack on his lap so that Sam can have some room.  He doesn’t shuffle down the bench to put some space between them.  So Sam ends up dumping the backpack on the sidewalk at their feet and shoving at Cas with his shoulder.  ” _Move.”_

"No," Cas says.  "I was here first."  

Some scuffling ensues.  Sam applies more force with his shoulder until he’s managed to push Cas half a foot down the bench.  Cas goes with it, more or less.  Sam can remember a time when trying to move Cas against his will was about as productive as trying to relocate Mount. Everest using a toothpick.  Now it’s a lot more like dealing with a resistant, resentful bag of slightly sour laundry.

He reaches over and kind of pats at Cas’s arm, at the crook of his elbow.  He instantly feels dumb, so he takes his hand away.  He never really knows what to do around Cas.  ”Hey,” he says.  “This is really great.  Really good.  That you’re here.”

Cas is staring down at his arm like he’s suddenly puzzled by its function.  “I’m glad to see you, too, Sam,” Cas says.  He doesn’t sound too certain about it, though.

"So, Cas," Sam says, casual.  "Whatcha up to?"

Cas rouses himself at that.  He smiles at Sam, like he’s got some sort of news that he’s fairly sure Sam will be glad to hear, but that he himself is slightly unsure of.  Sam knows that smile.  He’s seen what it does to Dean.  Dean gets this helpless, drifting look on his face whenever Cas looks at Dean with that pleased, uncertain smile.  “I’m leaving.”

That is more or less what Sam had figured. Still, it’s good to have all the facts.  “You mean-” He doesn’t quite know what to say.  “Is this, uh, permanent? Or only for a little while?”  Maybe Sam’s wrong about all of this.  Maybe Cas is just going on a day trip. To Topeka.  For some fresh air.  Maybe this isn’t a situation at all.  Certainly not anything worth stealing a station wagon over.  Sam lets himself hope.

"Forever, I think," Cas says, pretty definitely. 

Sam’s heart sinks somewhere around the sidewalk.  He’s starting to worry, now.  Dean had gotten up, silently punched a hole in the kitchen wall, and then left in the Impala, citing a need for supplies, for cash.  Sam hadn’t understood him.  But Dean will be getting back soon.  Dean will be coming home to a bunker without Sam or Cas in it.  Dean’s going to march from room to room shouting for Cas and then Sam and no one will be there and then Dean’s going to stop being angry and start being hurt.  And then Dean’s going to get that look on his face that he gets whenever he’s too hurt to even be angry.

So okay.  Sam gets it, a little.  He doesn’t particularly want to come home to that look on Dean’s face, either.  That’s one thing he and Cas have in common.  But, still.  Cas just got here.  “I don’t get it.  You can’t just leave.”

"Yes I can," Cas says.  

"We just found you.  You just got here.  You just _died,”_ Sam says, and something under his skin snaps unpleasantly.  It tells him to go, go.  He ignores it, for the moment.  “We’re not a motel, okay.  Can’t you stay with us for more than one night?”  

“ _No_ ,” Cas says, and Sam asks, “ _Why?”_.

Cas says, very quietly, “Dean thinks that it would be best.  For me to leave.”

Sam isn’t following, but alarm bells are ringing.  ”Cas,” he says, suddenly feeling like every law of the universe he’s ever taken for granted has just been proven false, “Cas, Dean wouldn’t want you to go, why—”  He stops, because he’s starting to think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for Cas to go.  Disaster follows Cas wherever he goes.  He’s being assaulted with images of avenging angels, hordes of demons.  The bunker going in flames.  His laptop melting. 

"This is stupid," he says, frustrated. 

"No," Cas says.  "It’s the truth."  His head starts drifting down into his hands again.  

"Cas," Sam says, slow.  He’s thinking it over.  He doesn’t like what he’s thinking.  "But where are you going to go?"

And Cas just says, “I don’t know.”

Sam has been sort of pissed at him for the last four hours.  Not really pissed.  More like furious.  But now he’s feeling a little less pissed and a lot more sorry.  So he ignores the sick feeling building up in his throat.  He says, “Okay, well.  I’ll go with you.”

—

“What are we doing?” Cas asks, kind of concerned.  Sam’s working the wires on the Volvo, but nothing’s happening.

“I’m helping you,” Sam explains. “We’re running away from home.”

"I am not," Cas says, dangerously, " _running away_.”

"Whatever," Sam says.

The Volvo doesn’t start.

"Fuck," Sam says.  

He has Cas hunts for change in the backseats.  They feed the meter.  Cas looks critically at the peeling green paint, the rusting door handles.  “I like your car, Sam,” Cas tells him.  ”Is it new?”

“Uh,” says Sam.  “Yes.  It is new.  It kind of sucks, though.”

"I think it has character," Cas says.

"I  _wish_ ,” Sam says, frustrated, “that it had a working alternator.” His fingers twitch.  He could fix it, if he had time. And parts.  The right tools. There’s a garage full of tricked-out vintage automobiles that Dean keeps sneaking off to gloat over in secret, when he thinks Sam is busy elsewhere.  The cars are impressive, Sam will allow, but at some point he’s gotten a taste for fixing up junkers.  He’s fixed the Impala.  He’s had his hands in her guts and he’s put her back together.  It hasn’t been all Dean.  He’s brought her back to life, too.

He goes with Cas back to the bus station and they stare at the maps, the routes, the prices.  Cas counts through a wad of cash crumpled inside a plastic baggie.  

"Where are we going?" Sam asks him.

Cas looks like he’s wondering the same thing.  “Omaha,” Cas answers, after a minute.  Sam cranes his head at the map.  The next bus for Omaha doesn’t leave until the next day, eight a.m.  

Then Cas says,”You can go back, Sam.  I’ll be all right.”

"Nah," Sam says.  Part of him still thinks that’s a really good idea.  The rest of him doesn’t.  It would be pretty awful to abandon Cas here, like all the running and hunting and the chasing after him that Sam has just gone through didn’t change things at all.  "I want to stay.  I could keep you company."

Cas stares hard at the map and doesn’t look at Sam.  He mutters something, quietly.  It sounds like, “Angels don’t _need_ company.”  But he also says, louder, “Thank you.”

The next bus for Lebanon isn’t for four more hours.  There’s another bus that leaves at six a.m.  Sam checks when Cas isn’t looking. Either way, they’ve got time to kill.  They walk up and down the streets for a while before camping out in front of a drugstore.  He gives Cas the rest of the quarters from the Volvo’s floorboards and leaves him frowning over a handful of quarters in front of the gumball machines.  

He goes inside the drugstore and uses the bathroom.  Cas is still at the gumball machines when he gets back out.  As he watches, Cas carefully inserts quarter and quarter and garners a collection of mostly red gumballs.  He comes back up and Cas puts a purple gumball in his hand.

“I don’t like purple,” Cas explains.

“Thanks,” Sam says.  

They sit on a bench just outside the drugstore.  Sam teaches Cas to blow bubbles.  He doesn’t teach Cas to take the wad of chewed gum and stick it under the bench, but Cas does so anyway.  Cas lists for him all the different types of chips he has learned to enjoy since he became human.  

"Ranch Doritos," Cas says.  "Garden salsa Sun Chips.  Potato chips, thinly-sliced.  Potato chips, crinkle-cut.  Potato chips, sprinkled with sea salt.  Potato chips, sun-baked.  Cheeze-Its."

"Those aren’t chips," Sam says.  "They come in a box, not a bag."  He sticks his gum under the bench and instantly feels guilty.

Cas ignores him.  ”Cheetos. Pringles.  _Pringles_ don’t come in a bag,” he adds, meaningfully. Sam turns his head and glances at him.  Cas is looking kind of tired.    

"Stay here," Sam says, and climbs to his feet.  He goes back inside the drugstore and buys a chocolate bar, some water, a box of nutrient bars.  He gets to the cash register and stops.  He goes back and picks up a bag of Cheetos.  

He goes back outside.  Cas is waiting for him on the bench.  Sam passes him the chocolate bar.  He’s been wondering for a while now if Cas might be diabetic.  Or something. He never eats anything but junk food.  He should probably mention it to Dean.  Cas nibbles at the chocolate like he’s not really interested in it, but the entire bar is gone the next time Sam glances over.

Cas ignores the nutrient bars.  He opens up the Cheetos and passes the bag to Sam.  They sit there on the bench, silently passing the Cheetos back and forth. 

"When  _I_ ran away from home,” he says to Cas, “I lived off Doritos and Funyuns and Mr. Pibb and pizza.”    

The Cheetos are gone.  Cas goes back to picking at the candy bar wrapper.  ”Why would you run away from home?” he asks.

"I don’t remember," Sam says.  Cas can tell it’s bullshit.  He frowns at Sam.  Then he carefully crumples up the empty wrapper and puts it back in the plastic shopping bag. "Okay, lots of reasons," Sam tells him.  "My dad.  Dean.  I was mad at them.  I wanted to be alone.  I wanted to make them feel bad." 

He watches as Cas squares his shoulders.  He thinks to himself that Cas doesn’t look any smaller as a human.  Sam had sort of expected him to be smaller.  He’s not, though.  Sam still feels slightly in awe of him, sometimes.  Like when Cas turns his head sharp and watchful, seeing something only he can comprehend, or when Cas does something that makes Dean go soft around the eyes, like wiping up spilled milk off the floor or carrying Dean’s duffel bag to the Impala or carefully folding fitted sheets up and setting them on the edges of everyone’s bed, Sam’s and Dean’s and Kevin’s, like he had last night.

"Is it common?" Cas asks.  He sounds thoughtful.  "Running away from home?"

"Well, yeah," Sam says.  "It’s, like, up there with lemonade stands and red wagons.  Every kid runs away from home once.  It’s a classic childhood experience.  It’s in pretty much every sitcom."

"Oh," Cas says.  Then, "I am not a child."

"Yeah, Cas," Sam says.  "I know.  I wasn’t either."


	2. Chapter 2

He drags Cas up and down the sidewalks for a while. He stops on occasion, to look through the windows of shops along the street, and to make Cas look through the windows, too.

"Window shopping," Sam tells him. He makes Cas stop and look through the window of a toy store. Cas stares through the glass with great reluctance and with none of the half-embarrassed envy Sam remembers from being twelve and wanting things that he knows perfectly well he can't have. "It's supposed to make you want stuff," Sam tells him.

Cas fixes his gaze on a model airplane hanging in the window. "I don't want stuff," he says, with assurance. 

"Not even a scooter?"

"No."

"A baseball bat."

"No."

"A teddy bear?" 

"No."

"Well, how else will we know what you want for Christmas?" Sam asks him. Cas looks away. Well. It was a stupid joke. Cas won't be around for Christmas, probably. But Sam's starting to think that's not how things ought to be. Even though Dean's the way he is. Even though Cas is who he is. Even though they've all tried and failed to find something that might pass for normal. Cas should at least spend Christmas with them. They should at least have something like that to look forward to. Like other people do. He says forcefully, "You'll get socks and underwear otherwise."

Cas gives him a sort of concerned look, like maybe he's a bit worried about receiving socks and underwear, as if it's some particularly heinous punishment Sam has just now dreamed up to torture him with. "It's all right, Sam," Cas says. He sounds alarmed. "I don't need anything."

"It's not really about needing stuff," Sam says. He wants to explain to Cas better than that. He wants to say something like, I know you'll forget about me telling you this, because you'd never even expect anything nice like that to happen. I know you'd never expect to spend Christmas with us. You'd never expect us to go out of our way, get a tree, buy presents, and do it all for you. You'd never expect to have us call you up and say Get over here, Cas or It's not the same without you here. I know you'd never expect Dean to move heaven and hell to save you, to do everything in his power to make your life the best it can be. And you don't even mind. And I don't understand, because sometimes I don't know what I'd do if Dean didn't do all that for me. 

But Sam doesn't say any of that to Cas. "Okay, well," he says finally. "I know I saw you making eyes at that teddy bear." He thinks Cas smiles at that, a bit. 

"Did you have a teddy bear?" Cas asks.

Sam remembers. "Not for long." He adds, with glee, "Not as long as Dean."

Sam stops to check out an outfitter's, one with kayaks roped together and lined up outside and tents, first-aid kits with those snakebite kits that his father always swore never worked; hiking boots, solar-panel portable shower stalls inside. "One of these days," Sam confides, "we are going to hijack Dean and take him camping." 

He follows Cas through the store, pointing out everything they'd need for such an occasion. Like that blue knit sock hat. That canister for food, to keep bears from ransacking their camp.

"I don't think this trip sounds very practical," Cas informs him. Cas sticks his hand inside a bin of compasses. He picks one up and frowns thoughtfully at it. He's not looking at Sam, but Sam's pretty sure he's still paying attention. "It'll be great," Sam tells him. "A family vacation. That means you, too." He knows Cas smiles at that. Those smiles are sort of the point to everything he's trying to do by being here, not letting Cas go off on his own, not quite yet. He can't just let Cas leave. Dean shouldn't be letting Cas just leave. Sam thinks sometimes that sooner or later Cas is going to fall off the map. Vanish completely. Disappear. Days will go by and Dean will start to worry, first quietly, then visibly, but when they try to track Cas down, they'll never find him again. Not a trace of him left. Not even a coat for Dean to hold on to, not anymore. 

It wouldn't be hard for something like that to happen. It almost had, only a few days ago. It's going to happen again, if Sam lets Cas go off on a bus like he hasn't got anyone in the world to be show up, to be there, to drag him back to the car and take him back home. Sam takes another of those cheap plastic compasses out of the bin. He pays for both of them at the counter, the compass in his hand and the one Cas is holding too. "You're gonna want this someday," he tells Cas. Cas stows his compass carefully away in one of the pockets on his backpack. 

They run into the public library eventually. Cas stops by the sign, looking across the parking lot at the building. Sam stops with him. 

"Do you want to sit?" Cas asks him. "They'll let you sit here. For a while." He adds, "They have A.C. They having vending machines."

"Yeah, I know," Sam tells him. "I used to do a lot of sitting. Like that." 

The library is small and dark and there are only two floors of books, the adult section, upstairs, and the children’s room, downstairs. Upstairs, there’s a shelf of used paperbacks for sale, and a row of public access computers. Cas stands in front of the paperbacks and reads the back cover of every romance novel and persistently unfolds each dog-eared page he comes across. 

Sam heads to the nonfiction section and scouts around in the 629.287s for Volvo manuals. He’s spent a lot of time in libraries like this one. Sometimes he’d hang around until the library closed, waiting for Dean to show. He’d go to the bathroom and make plans, think of what to do in case Dean never showed up. Things like hiding in the janitor’s closet until the librarians left for the night, then crawling back out and spending the night in the darkened stacks of books. He’d sit by the encyclopedias and play a game where he’d flip to random pages and stick his finger on an article and then find every other entry the article cross-referenced. He’d imagine sleeping in the kid’s section, on the bean bag chairs, setting his wristwatch so that he’s be sure to wake up and be back inside the closet before the librarians turned up again to unlock the doors. Sometimes it was more like wishing than making an emergency plan. But Dean had always showed up. He’d never had to spend the night alone at the library.

He reads about Volvo engines and replacement parts and ends up in a sort of waking dream about fixing up that godawful station wagon in the bunker's garage. Drinking beer and then taking it out to a car wash, driving it around town and watching droplets of water roll off the hood, down the windshield. Making a turn and heading down the interstate, just because he can. Driving until he starts seeing signs for Texas, driving until he's back on that road he's driven down so many times that it's almost started to feel familiar.

Cas drifts back to his side. ”She says we have fifteen minutes before it closes,” Cas says in a stage-whisper. Sam looks up. The librarian is turning off the lights on the second floor. 

Sam checks his watch. It's only four p.m. But the bus to Lebanon has already left. They aren’t going to make it back to the bunker tonight. 

"How about food?" he asks. Cas sort of glances in the direction of the vending machines. More Doritos, Sam thinks, and shudders. "Uh," he says, "I can pay."

Cas looks relieved. “Okay.”

They find an all-you-can-eat-buffet. Sam drags Cas over to the salad bar and points out all the ingredients Cas can add to his salad. Spinach leaves. Sunflower seeds. Mushrooms. They head back to the table with two bowls of salad. 

“Here,” he says, and passes Cas one of the bowls. Cas looks down at it dubiously. “It’s great,” Sam tells him. “You’ll love it.” But whatever miraculous power Dean has over influencing Cas is obviously lacking in Sam. Cas picks at the salad, takes a few bites, then sets his fork down and plays with his napkin. 

"I could just have chips," Cas suggests. "Chips would be okay."

“You can’t have chips,” Sam says. “Come on, Cas. Don’t you like it?”

Castiel looks up at him. He seems to take a moment to think over what he’s going to say. Finally he says, sort of worried, “No. It doesn’t taste right, Sam.”

Sam stares at him. 

“You know what we’d eat, back when Dean and me were little?” he says suddenly. Cas glances up at him. “What?” he asks.

Sam cracks a grin. “Hamburger helper. Dad would rent these motel rooms, the ones with kitchenettes, the ones with gas burners and a minifridge. And that's what Dean would make, like, all the time. We had it, like, three or four times a week. Hamburger helper. And I hated it. But it was the only thing Dean knew how to make, I guess. Or it was one of the cheapest things to cook. It made me feel sick. But I had to eat it, or I’d hurt Dean’s feelings, you know?”

Cas nods definitely at that. Cas, Sam supposes, knows all about Dean’s injured feelings. 

“So I swore up and down that when I grew up, the one thing I’d never do would be to ever eat hamburger helper ever again. I would get these magazines out of the library, right? The ones with recipes and pictures. And I looked at magazine pictures of these meals with fresh vegetables and sliced-up hams and stuff like that. And then when I went to college, the first thing I did was I went to the cafeteria and I got this fancy salad.”

Cas is watching him cautiously. “And it looked just like those magazine pictures. And i thought to myself, you know, finally I can do what I want. Finally I get to eat what I want to eat. Finally I can chose to eat something healthy instead of the crap Dean cooked for me. 

"And then I took a bite. And it was disgusting. I tried to eat those salads, I tried to eat fresh veggies, but all those things I’d wanted to try just tasted bad. They didn't taste like real food. And then I met Jess. And she saw that I didn’t like those things, I think. I had to learn how to eat fresh foods. My tastebuds were still stuck on this diet of diner food and ramen noodle and fries and grease and hamburger helper. 'Cause that was all that I’d ever had. And so Jess, she starts cooking hamburger helper like, once every couple of weeks. And I still hated it. i still hated it. But it was the only thing that tasted right to me.”

Cas nods, once. Then he goes back to staring at his salad. “Nothing tastes right,” he says at last. 

“Okay,” Sam says. “It’s fine.” And then, okay, he gets up. He takes the salad bowl away from Castiel, goes back to the buffet and comes back with two plates. Two hamburger. Two fries. When he returns, Cas is still right there, still playing with the napkin. He looks embarrassed. 

“You didn’t have to,” he mutters. 

Sam just says, "It's okay.” And then they end up smiling at each other, kind of hesitant but still real smiles. 

He knows Cas is gonna eat everything on his plate and then steal Sam's fries, too. He knows, okay. He’s seen Cas do it often enough to Dean recently. But he doesn't really mind.

“When we're done,” Sam says, and Cas looks at him attentively. “I’ll buy you dessert.”


	3. Chapter Three

He does mean to buy Cas dessert.  He does.  But he starts to reach for his wallet, and it isn’t there.  He freezes. Cas is eating his hamburger in large, slow bites and letting mustard drip down the side of his wrist without stopping to mop it up with a napkin.  He's absorbed in his own little world.  Sam checks his other pocket. “Cas,” he says, low, urgent.  Cas looks up at that, pulled out from his thoughts.  He’s frowning.  “We have to go,” Sam tells him.  

“Oh,” Cas says, sort of mumbly and staring at the remnants of his french fries like they’ve got instructions from god on them.  Cas stands up stiffly and pats at his pants a little.  He has little crusts of hamburger bun all over his jeans.  “You’re supposed to tip,” he says suspiciously.  

“I will, I will,” he says, just to shut Cas up. "Come on. Come _on._ Just go to the car, okay? I'll meet you there."  Cas narrows his eyes at Sam, but he carefully gets out of his chair and goes to stand by the door, then merges invisibly with a crowd of families and slips outside along with them.  Sam gives him a few minutes, then sneaks out the door behind him. 

Cas is waiting for him a two blocks down the street.  “How come you knew what to do?” he asks, curious, and Cas goes real quiet.   

"That's how you steal food, Sam," he says.  "When you don’t have any money.”

"You know about that."

"Yes," Cas says.  "I know a little about that.  You do, too."

\--

They survey the empty sport where the Volvo had been parked.  “I’m sorry about your car, Sam,” Cas says humbly.  "I know you had feelings for that Volvo."

"Not like that," Sam says hastily.  “It was not my car."  He sighs.  It’s still a dream of his, having his own car.  Dean would have hated the Volvo, and that’s almost enough to make Sam wish he could have kept it.  Maybe he could have it towed home.  Maybe it could have been his.  He could collect thrift store paperbacks and library books and leave them scattered in the back seat.  Maybe be could install a new radio-slash-cd player stereo system with a jack for his ipod, maybe throw the fuzzy dice away.  He could store water bottles in the glove box and keep blankets under the seats and sometimes he could jump inside the station wagon and turn the ignition and drive away.  Drive somewhere.  Not too far.  Maybe just as far as Lovewell State Park.  And he could park by the visitor’s center and eat bags of potato chips under the cover of darkness and sleep at a diagonal in the trunk, propped up against the back seat and reading by a flashlight.  The thought is enough to make him dizzy.  I want a car, Sam thinks.  When we get out of this mess, that's what I'm going to do. I am going to get my own car. If it's the last thing I do.

“It’s okay,” Cas says. He digs in his backpack for a moment, unzipping pockets and rifling through them. Finally he stands up and presses something in Sam's hand. Sam looks down.  The cell phone.  The compass.  

“Dean is going to be so pissed,” Sam says.  About picking them up.  About Sam’s stolen station wagon.  About everything.

"Don't worry, Sam." Cas says. And Cas sort of smiles at him, kind of hesitant, the way he has in the past that always made Sam wonder if he was just trying to be polite, but instead like he really does like Sam after all.  "I know how to do this.”

\--

They wait for Dean outside the bus station, sitting elbow-to-elbow on the bench. It reminds Sam of being sixteen and hanging around motel parking lots, sitting on benches illuminated by the glow of streetlights, waiting for Dean to come back from wherever it was he went at night.  

Cas keeps quiet.  It's really nice, his silent, steady presence, familiar and certain at Sam's side.  You could set a course by him.  You could navigate an ocean with him by your side, that's the kind of steady Cas has always been.  He thinks he’d want Cas around, no matter what: no matter how things turn out, no matter what Dean does or doesn't say to him in the future.  

At half-past nine, Cas stirs by his side.  "Sam?" he asks quietly.  Sam glances at him there, haloed by flashing neon signs, his face alternating green and blue and pink under the lights.   

"Yeah?"

“Why’d you come after me?”  

“Couldn’t just let you leave,” Sam explains, and sighs.  ”You’re important, Cas.”

“Not more important than helping Dean,” Cas argues.  "Not more important than doing what you do."

“I _am_ helping Dean,” Sam says.  He doesn’t really know what makes him think Castiel is gonna open up to him, of all people, if he won’t even talk to Dean.  But maybe.  It might help.  He might help.  And he wants to. “Look, Cas.  This is something you need to know.  Dean isn’t really happy when you’re not there with him.  Cas,” Sam chews on his lower lip for a moment. “There isn’t anything more important than getting you home, okay?  We need you there.”

“Okay,” Cas says.  He sounds awed.  “You came after me,” Cas repeats, slow, like it’s taking a while for that idea to sink in.

"Yeah," Sam says.  "You know, it would be great to have you as a roommate."

"You think so?"

"Yeah.  I do."

There's a ghost of a smile around the corners of Cas's mouth.  "You’re a good friend, Sam," he says.  "I wish I had a brother like you."

I do, too, Sam thinks.  

And.

Well.

Why not?

"I could be your brother," he says.  "We could be brothers, me and you.  You could be our third wheel.  I wouldn’t mind.”

"That might be... awkward," Cas says cautiously.  But he smiles anyway, a real smile even if it's kind of sheepish, eyes somewhere on the pavement by his shoes.  My brother, Sam thinks.  I have two brothers.  This is the one who likes Doritos and gum and french fries.  This is my brother, quiet and steady and certain.  This is my brother who I would die for. 

"Nah," Sam tells him.  "It wouldn't be.  Not with you."  

 --

Sam's reading the back of a Kansas City informational brochure out loud, but Cas isn't really paying any attention.  Sam's thinking about going inside one of the gas stations and getting a bottle of water with the last of his quarters, maybe, but then he's hearing the Impala, cutting through the noise of the streets.  Heading straight for them.  Cas's shoulders hunch up.  Just a bit.  

Dean parks by the side of the road.  He sits inside the Impala for a long moment. Sam watches him uneasily. He can see, even from across the street, how Dean's knuckles are tight around the steering wheel.  Then Dean opens the door and slides out and stands by the edge of the street, looking around. Looking for them.  Then he's heading towards them, with great loping strides, like he wants to run but can't.

“What have you two been up to?” Dean asks, more to Cas than Sam.  

"We went to R.E.I.," Cas says, like he's reciting a list. "We went to the library. Sam didn't pay for dinner."

“He doesn’t like purple gum,” Sam offers.  "He likes red."

He can almost hear Dean’s heart crack open.  He watches his brother sort of wilt.  “You gave him gum,” Dean says, and looks at Sam accusingly.  “Without me?”  But then Cas reaches out and touches Dean's elbow, and Dean stops and stares at him instead. 

“We've been running away,” Cas explains.  “But it's all wrong.  Will you come with us?  It’s not the same without you.”

Dean just keeps staring at him.  Like he's wandering in a desert and Cas is a mirage, an oasis.  And then it's like Dean sets his compass by him, and starts heading his way.  Like Cas is his north star.  Maybe, Sam thinks, maybe if we both just set our course by Cas.  Maybe he could be a fixed point.  Maybe we could be a family.  “Yeah,” Dean says, kind of hoarse, but Sam can tell he’s really pleased.  “Yeah, okay.  I’ll come.”


End file.
